First used in a 1964 article addressing the ways of communicating emotional meaning, the concept of emotional intelligence would later take on more visibility during the mid 1980s with Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences where he explores the idea that humans have many different types of intelligences and how each of these interact. In the 1990’s Dan Goleman gave EI a harder edge distinction from typical intelligence and technical ability and popularized the idea linking it to successful work in a variety of settings including leadership and business.

Since then there has been a continued discussion as to whether EI is a set of traits that underlie and make up a part of individual personality, or an application which is more focused on how EI insights are used by individuals to be effective actors. There is also a “mixed” model that doesn’t look for purity of one or the other but draws on both to produce a framework for assessing and improving human social interactions.

For our leadership considerations there are four essential dimensions of EI that can be used for improving leadership effectiveness. These have a linear quality about them, but real emotional intelligence is fluid and allows space to create a capacity for continuous interaction and growth.

Self-awareness

The first dimension of emotional intelligence is self-awareness. With a rich set of meanings and traditions in philosophy and psychology, it is no surprise that self-awareness and EI are strongly connected. For our purposes here, it is the quality of being aware of how conscious you are of yourself as an actor in a social situation both personally and in relationship to other individuals.

In leadership situations, specific dimensions of this awareness are particularly important. The first is a sense of your leadership style. Are you an inclusive leader or more of an independent leader? Do you see and value the “big picture” or are you more focused on the details and implications of small actions? Are you more reflective and thoughtful or more expressive and engaging? You may be effective as a leader on any side of these pairings, but which one seems to be the most comfortable or natural to you?

Beyond style, leaders also possess a set of strengths and weaknesses relevant to their leadership responsibilities. Are you a strong communicator? Are these strengths of communication equally strong from one-on-one conversations to large presentations? Do you have deep technical knowledge related to your leadership role? Have you the benefit of outside perspectives or mastered a particular set of analytical tools? Are you a good judge of people? How effective are you at developing and motivating others? What happens inside you when there is a great deal of conflict?

Many of these may fit into your leadership style or at least inform it, but they are more independent and objective than the aggregate sense of style.

A by-product of both your style and these strengths and weaknesses, is how we are perceived by others. How do others see you in your role as a leader? In one type of organization a person who has a humble demeanor and more of a “servant” leader style might be highly valued and trusted. In another, perhaps more competitive setting, this same person might be seen as weak and ineffective. Knowing what others think is important for a truly emotionally intelligent actor.

Your self-awareness is also boosted by your understanding of what you like and shun in a work setting. These preferences may shape where you spend time and energy and may be stumbling blocks that blur the focus on what is most important for the success of your leadership. For instance, you might avoid matters of personal conflict and fail to raise an issue that needs to come to someone’s attention. Or you may overspend effort working with outside constituents because you are good at it and fail to invest adequately in developing internal resources.

All leaders have aspirations and ambitions and the more insight you have into yours the higher your level of EI. Aspiration is the desire to achieve a high or laudable goal. Ambition is the desire for status, rank and power. Both are often found in leaders, but they are different qualities. Understanding this difference and which of the two is most important will help enrich your self-awareness.

To have self-awareness it is also important to have a good sense of where our values lie and how and when we trade them against each other. Values can be situational, but the exercise where you list what is important and then discuss it with someone who knows you well can be revealing.

We all fear things and fear can have a large influence on leadership. Sometimes these fears are from our far away past and sometimes from the immediate context of our work. These fears drive our leadership behavior in ways that are both positive and negative. The challenge of the self-aware leader is to surface these fears if they are hidden, understand them and where they came from, look honestly at how they impact work and gain some measure of control over them to enhance their positive contributions while minimizing or eliminating the negative impact they may be having.

Finally, a self-aware leader will understand the ebb and flow of their immediate emotional state, such as, “I’m a little down today because of some changes in my personal life” or, “I’m counting on that emotional burst of energy that will come from finishing this project”, being able to both use and control them as needed for leadership effectiveness. There is as well the awareness of deeper psychological states such as a deep-seated inability to trust others or an exuberance for new things that may go well beyond what is warranted. Knowing these elements of our self and either changing them or accommodating them always makes a leader more effective.

The basis of wisdom from ancient Greece onwards has been to know one’s self. It is a daunting challenge, but it is also the basis of leadership wisdom that is being emotionally intelligent.

Other Awareness

“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” Hemingway’s advice to a young writer

The quest to be emotionally intelligent now shifts from ourselves to the other: a person, a group, a profession, an organization and a people. All of these dimensions of the other will challenge a leader during a career. How do we move beyond our perceptions of self with all of its heuristics of bias to enter a mode of welcoming the stranger? There is a growing body of evidence that our biology disposes us to connect to others and to be understood and return this favor. The beginning of this is through other-awareness and this involves as much work, if not more, than being self-aware.

Many of the same qualities that we want to know about ourselves we will need to understand in the other person as well to have true emotional intelligence. You will need to be curious about their style as a leader, their strengths and weaknesses, how others see them, their ambition and dreams, their values and fears. Learning about the qualities that others have, not to be judgmental, but to contrast and understand, gives us insight in how better to relate ourselves to the other in question.

We all have an ego, and it is why starting with self-awareness is so important. When you meet another person, especially in a work or leadership setting, you will encounter their ego as well and there are some other things you will want to know about the person. Egocentricity is how much the person in front of you is focused on themselves and their desires, and how open they are to understanding others and specifically us. If there is not much give in this for them then a shared agenda may not be possible and our strategy for working with them will need to change.

Beyond their ego and its hold on them, we also want to make an assessment of what educators call the “it” factor. Just how savvy, adaptive, aware and attuned are they? Do they seem to get the little jokes at the start of the conversation? Can they move the conversation to the next topic or next level with their own style? Are they attentive to my needs with what our grandmothers would have called “good manners?”

You also want to discover and build whatever common ground there is. It might be mutual friends, a common experience, graduate school or a particular workplace, or maybe you are from the same part of the country. It does not have to be a lot, but we want the two of us to begin to think of ourselves as on the same team and even a little in common can help solidify this. From the outset of our encounter they will be sending all sorts of non-verbal messages and you will want to be attuned to what is coming your way. Do they seem comfortable or is there some anxiety about them? Is there an openness when they are listening or do they exhibit caution? These messages can be conveyed in facial expressions, gestures, eye contact, voice modulation, dress, and artifacts such as office décor.

Additionally, language is rarely just the words we speak, and to be fully aware of the other you will want to listen carefully and unpack their words for fuller meaning. A good set of active listening skills is essential here, but the first rule is to remember that listening does not mean waiting to talk. Projecting understanding of what they are saying in your thoughts, asking questions to clarify, asking for examples and acknowledging when you see something differently, but in a manner that accepts their truth, are all ways to be more actively engaged with their talk and to take away a deeper awareness of them.

While knowing ourselves is important, knowing the other is essential. Without the substance of the other we run the risk in becoming lost in our own egocentric world which has limited horizons and is destined as such to never arrive at a valuable social intelligence.

Situational Awareness

Humans are hard wired with the ability to assess situations. In a modern world that is faster, more anonymous, and sometimes more consequential, our evolved instincts can find it hard to cope with our immediate situational reality. Recognizing what is needed in any given situation is essential to being emotionally intelligent. For our purposes this situational awareness has several basic elements.

The first is an awareness of what is happening in the moment. This starts with both self and other awareness, but expands to include the setting, cultural context, history of interactions, other impeding events, and your understanding of the agenda, formal or informal, for the engagement. There is a pattern that you come to expect in each engagement. Even with a new encounter, when your experience varies from expectation, it becomes an important part of your awareness and informs the next phase of the process.

As your perceptions are shaping your awareness, they are also leading you to judgments about what is happening. These assessments lead to understanding of the situation. For instance, you may have projected that informing a client or team member of a new opportunity for them would be met with enthusiasm and excitement, instead you perceive that the news is causing them some anxiety and that is moving toward a reaction that looks like hostility and withdrawal. You now understand the situation differently and can project it into the future with some predictive qualities. In the situation above you might conclude that you could force the issue, but without their active buy-in and engagement you may risk damage to the relationship, and now have the option to choose a different path.

A convenient tool for making these assessments is the quick six of considerations:

• power – what is it, who has it, both formal and informal

• relationship – is it good or bad, important or not, short or long term, good as it is or needs to be better

• quality – is there a technically correct answer or a clearly better path that is understood and shared

• importance – where does this fall in the priorities of the organization’s mission, is it critical or just nice to have, and what is the importance of this to me (also spelled ego)

• time - can we work some more on this or does it need to move now

• buy-in – how much engagement do I need from them or can I go it alone?

Of course, these six interact constantly in your assessment of the situation making them more complex and there are always other matters at play, but I find the quick six to be a good foundation to begin an assessment of a situation or to frame beforehand if the opportunity allows.

Because the hard wiring to respond to our environment resides deeply in our emotional domain, while the choice of a better path lies more in our reasoning capacity, it is important to recognize both and determine the impact on us by balancing reason and emotion. Recognizing a threatening move by another person is an important part of assessment. Understanding how we might best respond to achieve our desired outcome allows us to make of sense of what is happening and more importantly what it means, which now informs our emotional intelligence on how we should act.

Self-management

The three preceding elements of emotional intelligence are matters that mostly go on in our head. But as Wordsworth reminds us in Tintern Abbey that the best portions of any good life are the “little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.” It is the actions that we take that will be the ways in which emotional intelligence marks us with others.

A first step toward right action is knowing and accepting the self of which we are now more aware. This does not mean that you should not be working to improve yourself in constructive ways, but instead looking at yourself in the bigger picture. Looking at the ups and downs, left and right, and all the in-betweens will allow for a more authentic approach with others as well as a more human understanding and acceptance of their strengths and weaknesses.

In this regard it is also useful to be open about yourself with others. This should be done carefully, no one wants to know everything about us, but building a capacity to be more transparent enlists others in our quest of self-management, makes us feel more genuine, and creates a context for more accountability.

To regulate yourself will be important to have a good sense of short and long term aims and a capacity to balance the two. In this regard it will always be useful to have an appreciation of how your impulse control mechanism and temper work. While our own self-awareness may give us these insights, looking for others to shed an outside perspective may help in seeing them more clearly, and understanding when and where they come from.

While it may seem like the balance of short and long terms aims is a given, it can be useful to have a comprehensive picture of what success looks like when deciding what 'right actions' to take. This exercise gives us a chance to have an aspirational goal, examine it from how we think others will see it, and also give some insight into the trade-offs that we or others might need to consider going forward. This can also be a good question to build common ground and trust among team members.

Controlling your impulses and temper will be greatly aided by adding two qualities to your leadership skills. The first is a mindfulness practice. This should be something that speaks to you and can become a regular part of your day, therefor it needs to be something that you have time to dedicate to. Some leaders find a meditation regimen works to raise mindfulness. Others find yoga or regular exercise work well. Sometimes just taking breaks to get outside, reserving time for reflection daily, or even breathing slowly into the moment can work. The path should be yours, but it is an essential part of self-management.

The second quality is developing an attitude of curiosity rather than judgment. Curiosity allows us to continue learning and keeps our minds open to new possibilities. This is greatly aided by the type of listening discussed above but carries it a step further and is more engaged than even active listening. As a leader you do not surrender any of your responsibilities or even power, but they are channeled in a way that actively engages the other person or group in a consideration of a collective success. Hard decisions and steps are still taken, but there is more engagement in this approach then emotional reactions or telling others about their reality.

Two tactical considerations when managing yourself are knowing your body and being able to walk away gracefully. Emotional intelligence involves the right balance of the mind and heart. When they are in conflict, we have a visceral reaction that locates somewhere in our body, a stomachache, flushing neck, throbbing temple, tightening jaw, or scrunching shoulders. Whatever yours is, you should be aware of it and also recognize that this symbol might go off before you realize what is going on. When this happens, you need to be prepared and ready to walk away until things can return to the right balance. A practiced statement with these core elements (but in your words) is good to have at hand: “This seems really important to both or all of us. I feel myself getting a little triggered emotionally here and I know that is not good. Can I ask that we take a break and get back to this soon?” Then schedule the time right then.

Finally, self-management is greatly aided if the rest of your life is in good proportion. Is your work-life balance something that supports you and your family. Do you get regular exercise? Have a healthy diet? Do you do other things than work: hobbies, sports, travel? Without efforts along these lines, and some success, it will be hard be as fully emotionally intelligent as you want to be.

“To accept one’s past- one’s history- is not the same thing as drowning in it: it is learning how to use it.”

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time